himself into the picture, and entertained his sitter with reminiscences of Sir Joshua. At the last sitting, when the painter asked Scott if he had sat for his portrait, the latter replied that he and his dog Maida had done it so frequently that Maida, when he saw a man take out pencil and paper and look at him, used to set up a howl and run off to the Eildon Hill. But his master, he added, however he might howl, could never run much, so he had to dree his weird. Northcote's portrait was seen at Edinburgh in 1871. Sir Walter was once more well received by the King, and arranged with his secretary about the dedication of the magnum opus. He also dined by command with the Duchess of Kent, and saw her little daughter, now become heir-apparent. Like most of his contemporaries he disliked the name of Victoria, and hoped it would be dropped; and he was rather sceptical as to her not knowing about the prospect that lay before her. He thought her well educated and taken care of, but not likely to turn out pretty. When the Queen, nearly forty years later, visited Abbotsford, she wrote her name in the Journal, confiding to her own diary that she felt it an act of presumption. Next morning Scott set out for Brighton in a light coach-the journey took six hours to see his poor sick little grandson Johnnie Lockhart. He found the place doubled in size since his last visit in the year of Waterloo. He left it with a heavy heart, fearing the worst. During the remainder of his stay in London he sat to Chantrey for the last time, met at breakfast a kindred spirit in the agriculturalist, Coke of Norfolk, afterwards Earl of Leicester; obtained promises of Indian cadetships for two of his friend Allan Cunningham's sons; dined at Richmond with Lord Sidmouth; took Moore, Wordsworth, and Rogers to Hampton Court; called on Madame D'Arblay. He also bought reprints in Chancery Lane, and declined a proposal to write a continuation of Cotton's Angler. Of the nine matters he enumerates as accomplished by this expedition, not more than three at most can be said to relate to his own personal interests. And one of these last was his having "picked up some knowledge of the state of existing matters." On the way home, Gill's Hill, the scene of a recent murder in which Scott had become interested, was inspected. Here he repeated the verses in Theodore Hook's mock ballad : "They cut his throat from ear to ear, His brains they battered in; His name was Mr. William Weare, He read Lockhart's Life of Burns and some of Napier's Peninsular War during the journey, which was broken by a short stay with Mr. Morritt of Rokeby. The Lady Anne notes that at Carlisle after Sir Walter and herself left the church where Scott had married his wife, they went on to the Castle. An attendant pointed out the very dungeon where Fergus MacIvor had spent the night before his execution; on which "Peveril" asked innocently, "Indeed, are you quite sure, sir?" The smothered fit of coughing with which he was troubled when the man assured him that there was no doubt of it, made the latter so angry that the lady felt bound to whisper to him that the visitor was the author of Waverley himself. A scene was avoided only by the precipitate flight of the supposed tourists. A few days after Sir Walter got back to Scotland we find him registering a resolution "to work sans intermission for lost time." Encouraged by his creditors' sanction of the elaborate reissue of the novels and the somewhat unexpected success of the last new one, he keeps it to the letter: "I am become a sort of writing automaton, and truly the joints of my knees, especially the left, are so stiff and painful in rising and sitting down, that I can hardly help screaming-I that was so robust and active," he writes piteously after a hard day's work in the Parliament House and at his desk. He was also much troubled at the time with rheumatic headaches. His annual excursion with the Blair-Adam Club gave him some relief; but the continued strain was beginning to tell, one sign of which was that the Journal was left unopened for six months. When he takes it up again it is to record a feeling of increasing weakness in his lame leg and the dread of being altogether disabled. He is comforted, however, by continued progress in "cash affairs." During this winter he sat for yet another portrait-that by Graham Gilbert, painted for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a duplicate of which is now in the English National Portrait Gallery. "If I be not known in another age, it will not be for want of pictures," he says truly. Anne of Geierstein; or, the Maid of the Mist, the last of the Waverley series into the details of whose composition I have the heart to enter, is now "the task." The story is a kind of sequel to Quentin Durward, in so far as it takes up the career of Charles the Bold and carries it to its tragical conclusion under the walls of Nancy. But before we reach Burgundian territory we have to go "muzzing" on (the expression is Scott's own) with two travellers in Switzerland, where, with the help of books and his friend Skene, the writer succeeds wonderfully with the scenery, but cannot rouse the reader's interest in the slow-moving tale. "The demands of art have been more than I can bear" is one of the despondent remarks of the usually sanguine writer. The introduction of King René of Provence, the old Troubadour King, who recked little that his realms were for the most part as imaginary as his songs, was a happy thought that came too late. Still, it afforded opportunity for the fine contrast between the happy southern nature to which life was sunshine and song and that stormy soul, to the end the prey of ambition and revenge, Margaret of Anjou. So long as Scott keeps to historical characters and scenes-shows us the banished Queen of England in mendicant's garb in Strasburg Cathedral, and an exile chafing with impatience at her father's Court at Aix; or Charles of Burgundy bullying his Estates at Dijon and, later, stunned with unexpected defeat at the hands of the rude Swiss-he still remains the Master. But, alas! we have to set off against the splendid battlepieces of Granson and Morat, awesome glimpses of the terrible Secret Tribunal called the Vehme-gericht, and the pathetic death-scene of Margaret, the general lifelessness of the story itself, in which even the vengeful schemes of Albert of Geierstein scarcely emerge clearly enough to stir the blood. His daughter, the Maid of the Mist herself, is at once too shadowy for the love of a mortal and too substantial to be thought of as a |
